A peer-to-peer cash strategy for General Protocols

At General Protocols, we are fans of spreading crypto as cash, money that not only can be used, but is used permissionlessly everywhere. With its track record of maintaining affordable fees, permissionlessness and neutrality, Bitcoin Cash has always been an obvious choice for us.

When we founded General Protocols two years ago, though, we saw two obvious problems not just with Bitcoin Cash, but with any cryptocurrency:

1. The value of cryptocurrencies fluctuates too much, making them difficult to adopt as direct alternatives to traditional fiat whether online or offline. Merchants who wish to have manageable levels of risk have to go through complex maneuvers that often conflict with the goals of lowering friction, permissionless transactions and lowering transaction costs, canceling some of the core competencies of crypto.

2. The wild west of cryptocurrency speculation is almost absurdly huge in size, with a correspondingly huge amount of liquidity flowing through the market, yet it contributes little towards crypto's most world-changing quality: its adoption as money.

Bitcoin Cash does have a few tricks up its sleeve, among them re-enabled math operations at a protocol level, and an additional opcode over BTC: OP_CHECKDATASIG. We soon realized, through discussion with many of our brilliant peers, a way to use this protocol advantage to merge speculation and value stabilization in a way never seen before. AnyHedge (whitepaper) is the first among many tools that will contribute towards this vision.

Describing the tool on a high level, though, is only the first step. We understand that in order to make a meaningful impact, we must get traders, merchants and users to participate at scale, and we must build the tools to enable them - nobody is going to do it for us!

Building on this vision, we have since released or maintained:

• Electrum-Cash, an open source tool for web clients to interface with a redundant network of BCH nodes for robustness

• AnyHedge Library, an open source tool for creating, redeeming and conducting other operations on AnyHedge contracts

• BCH Price Oracle Library, an open source tool for creating and using price messages that are tailor-made for the BCH context. In addition, a novel and complete specification (currently being updated from block-based to time-based), and operation of multiple publicly available price oracles.

• An automated, battle-tested AnyHedge redemption service that is available through the AnyHedge Library

• Last but not least, a collaboration with Detoken that demonstrated the viability of AnyHedge in a non-custodial, user-friendly context.

These were all important steps, yet we need more. We have to bring more users, more liquidity to this vision, in a way that is easier to adopt for businesses and users alike.

Going forward, stay tuned for:

• Small, adaptable projects and collaborations where AnyHedge is used in novel contexts. Defi is for everyone, not just traders!

• More trading pairs and tools that learn from our Detoken experience

• A generalized, non-custodial BCH platform that not only enables AnyHedge, but is also adaptable to a variety of other Defi products for truly peer-to-peer use cases.

We are also watching the new sidechain project, SmartBCH, with great interest. We believe the UTXO model on native BCH chain offers unique advantages compared to SmartBCH's EVM, and see them as complementary. So while we remain committed to executing our vision on the main BCH chain, we will also explore possibilities on SmartBCH.

Bitcoin Cash is blooming, and we intend to continue playing an important role in it for the months and years to come. We hope you are as excited as we are!

General Protocols Blog

This article forms part of the General Protocols Blog, a collection of cross-platform links showcasing our team's community activity, Bitcoin Cash projects, UTXO development, and general crypto musings.